number 34 • Winter 2018

Authors

Brigitte Berger

articles

IN the war that is currently waged over the American mind, the family, no doubt, plays a pivotal role. It is here that today’s most controversial issues-human sexuality, teenage pregnancies, abortion, gender roles, women’s rights, socialization and education of children, their care as well as that of other weaker members of the familyare turned into fierce strategic battles that go well beyond their proclaimed causes. In so far as these and related matters are no longer held to be primarily of individual concern and personal responsibility, but have become public issues demanding public attention and governmental action, the family has been politicized to a degree heretofore unknown in American society. A monumental avalanche of publications attests to the degree of politicization, just as it attests to the futility of attempts to solve, through political mechanisms, symptoms of problems whose causes are only dimly perceived.

ANYONE who wishes to understand the controversy over the differences in I.Q. scores among different racial, ethnic, and social groups is faced with three formidable obstacles: the veritable mountains of seemingly contradictory empirical data; the growing body of vitriolic polemical writings, which scarcely facilitate the dispassionate examination of the data; and what might be described as the paradigmatic rut-the fixation on the old intellectual models of the Nature/Nurture debate. Given these obstacles, it may be useful to try out a new model that will offer a fresh perspective on the data and, at the same time, shift the political ground of the controversy.

IN recent years there has been a phenomenal increase in the number of “special children.” The term comes from the educational establishment, where it is used to refer to all children who have unusual learning problems not readily explainable by either medical or sociological factors (blindness, say, or ignorance of the English language). A study by the Rand Corporation, released in February 1974, asserts that some nine million Americans under the age of 21 (roughly 10 per cent of the population in that age bracket) suffer from various forms of “learning disability.” By January 1975 informed observers already spoke of a “learning disability epidemic,” allegedly affecting up to 40 per centof school-age children.

IN early 1971 an article by Peter Berger and myself, entitled “The Blueing of America,” was published in The New Republic. It was written under the stimulus (a very negative stimulus) of Charles Reich’s The Greening of America, which in turn represented a certain climax of the mood among many intellectuals in the late 1960’s. This mood was characterized by a violent repudiation of the political, social, and cultural realities of America, and by a celebration of the youth culture and the counterculture, along with a shifting array of radical movements that were to be the salvation of the country. Reich’s book also helped to depoliticize this mood, turning it away from politically-oriented radicalism to what was alleged to be a “cultural revolution.”